February 01, 2016

London Exhibition Explores Truth Of Leonardo da Vinci’s Genius

Everybody
knows about Leonardo da Vinci, and much of what they know is wrong.

The story
of the Tuscan notary’s bastard child who was wafted up to the summit of the
Renaissance on the thermals of his own genius is so familiar as to be almost
invisible, like the nastiness hidden in the words of nursery rhymes. Leonardo
is part of the furniture, the world’s mad uncle — Einstein, Van Gogh and Heath
Robinson rolled into one global super-meme.

Among the
millions who clog up the Louvre each year for a fleeting half-glimpse of the Mona
Lisa, how many know that the man who painted it also built the first tank,
the first helicopter and the first scuba apparatus a good four centuries before
their time? Probably a solid majority. How many of them realise that this
“fact” is a tissue of fascist revisionism put ­together on the direct orders of
Mussolini? Maybe only a handful.

Next month
an exhibition at London’s Science Museum, Leo­nardo da Vinci: The Mechanics
of Genius, will wrestle with the hardest questions of all about Leo­nardo:
why is the world so incurably fascinated with a man who had ­almost no effect
on the course of history? Did the original nutty ­inventor really invent
anything at all?

These might
seem like odd things to ask about a master ­engineer. After all, the
centrepiece of the show will be 39 not-quite-life-sized models based on the
sketches in Leonardo’s notebooks. All the greatest hits are there: the
pyramid-shaped parachute; the bat-winged flying boat; a floating siege weapon
for crossing moats and clobbering the walls inside. There is even a cube on
wheels, designed to be driven by the wind.

Yet none of
these contraptions was built in Leonardo’s day. Many of the more plausible
devices are mere copies of the machines he saw springing up in the busy
technological revolution unfolding across Italy. A monumental crane for raising
columns was borrowed wholesale from Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect who
raised the dome over Florence ­Cathedral.

To put it bluntly,
Leonardo had no real influence whatsoever on engineering and natural philo­sophy
in his lifetime. His workshop was tiny and rudimentary, without even a furnace
for casting metal. The famous drawings that spill over into the spidery margins
of his diaries are not blueprints at all, but simply jottings for his own
amusement. “I know,” he once wrote, “that many will call this useless work.”

Claudio
Giorgione, curator of the Science Museum show, thinks Leonardo was absolutely
right on that score. “He didn’t publish his work,” Giorgione says. “Most of the
drawings we have in the notebooks are a sort of very, very large diary. In the
second half of his life he tried to prepare a treatise on mechanics and hydraul­ic
engineering, but he didn’t have the time to share his findings.”

You might
reasonably ask why the Science Museum, of all places, would lavish all this
effort on a man whose technical achievements did not even begin to come to
light until 300 years after his death. The answer is that all the brilliance
dissipated in those notebooks has an enormous amount to teach us today.

Leonardo
lived in an age when art and science were not differentiated into separate
disciplines as they are now. His paintings and all of the fantastical machines
that mushroomed out of his observations were one and the same. This was a mind
that could spot the mechanism powering a timepiece and design it into a flying
crossbow, or spend hours minutely cataloguing the soft fall of light through a
window only to develop it into the smouldering sfumato of The Last Supper.

He was a
remarkable draftsman and mathematician, but what he had in abundance was a
sense of the world as a vast piece of clockwork whose parts were infinitely
interchangeable. We are only just coming to realise the value of this view
today. A large section of the Science Museum’s show will be dedicated to bio­mimicry,
the modern art of stealing the tricks nature has evolved over millions of
years.

Just as
Leonardo obsessed over the way air flows around a bird’s wings as it glides and
dreamt of human flight, so scientists are assembling swarms of tiny drones that
imitate the flight of bees, or copying the nanostructures of spider-silk to
spin materials that are harder than steel and lighter than cotton.

More
endearingly, Leonardo’s special brand of playfulness could be rollicking good
fun. In 1490, while he was at the court of the Sforzas in Milan, he was asked
to design the set and costumes for a performance of Bernardo Bellincioni’s
masque Il Paradiso at the young duke’s wedding to Isabella of Aragon. On
the stroke of midnight, the curtains were drawn to reveal Leonardo’s paradise,
an enormous half-egg slathered in gilt and lit up with a night sky’s worth of
candles. The seven known planets were arranged in a perfect facsimile of the
solar system. Giorgione, who has rebuilt the set into a miniature theatre for
visitors to toy with, calls it the world’s first planetarium.

There was
also a kind of mercenary helplessness to Leonardo. Not long after the French
took Milan in 1499, he found himself in charge of the special effects for
Poliziano’s operetta Orfeo. A great sweep of rugged mountains opened up
to disgorge Pluto, the king of the Underworld, prowling in his cavern. But
months later he was back to dreaming up guns and siege engines for his new
overlords with the same childish relish. The exhibition features a model of his
absurd, wheeled wigwam of cannon based on drawings that were cut away to reveal
the exquisite mechanics of death inside.

“This is a
paradox,” Giorgione says. “He writes at more than one point in his life that he
didn’t like war and he considered it a crazy thing to pursue, but at the same
time he works so much on military weaponry. Because he was a very pragmatic
man, he knew that this was one of the keys to enter the court, to get close to
the dukes and get their attention and money to carry on with all his other
studies.”

Leonardo
owes a large debt to a much more recent tyrant.

The myth of
Leo­nardo the inventor only really took off in Milan on the brink of World War
II. Mussolini wanted a hero to demonstrate Italy’s congenital mastery over
science, technology and the arts. He found Leonardo. The dictator commissioned
scholars to design the first set of comprehensive models based on the sketches
in Leo­nardo’s long-neglected notebooks. Built on a monumental scale in blood
red and inky black, the flying ­machines and wild ­engines of war were
exhibited in 1939 alongside other triumphs of Italian engineering such as the
country’s first television shows. The message was not a subtle one. The aim
was, as the show’s program noted in the clanking prose of autocracy, “to
demonstrate the continuity of the creative genius of the race and the great
possibilities opening up to those within the ­climate of fascist will”.

Astonishingly,
it stuck. Mussolini’s models may have been lost on a ship somewhere in the
north Pacific, but their ghosts live on.

Yet these
machines were never meant to be. One of the inspirations for the new show was ­Giuseppe
Pag­ano, a leading Fascist party architect who worked on Mussolini’s Leonardo
exhibition but later turned dissident and ended up dying in an Austrian
concentration camp in 1945. Even at the time, ­Pagano saw a striking beauty in
the impracticality of the drawings. “Rather than machines to be patented,” he
wrote in his notes, “these became rational ­devices, mechanical experiments of
sublime value.”

What Pagano
realised, and what emerges strongly from the Science Museum show, is that
Leonardo was really the opposite of an inventor. He was a man whose mind raced
from the stoop of a falcon or the churning of a water wheel to the higher
ground of abstract reasoning. Behind all of the museum’s interactive
sketchbooks and haunting models is this search for a “universal knowledge” in
which everything that moves is set out in its place like the spheres in an
orrery.

Like
Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Leonardo saw the physical world with all
its messy interactions as a series of problems that led upwards through
mathematics and logic to a single, divine truth that resides as much in the
heart as in the head. And this is the greatest legacy that he has left for us
today: a vision of a world ­entirely composed of shades of light and wheels
forever turning.